Intelligent Decision Systems (Spain)

Stereo matching recovers 3D scene information based on the correlation between corresponding pixels. Despite impressive progress, existing methods lack sufficient correlation priors in ill-posed regions such as occlusions, detailed and reflective regions. In this paper, we propose Geometry Aware Stereo Matching Network (GEAStereo) to enhance geometric structure perception and address this issue. We adaptively incorporate the Monocular Disparity Distribution Prior into the stereo cost volume, building Mono-Stereo Fusion Volume (MSFV), which effectively captures global geometric structures and rectifies the correlation information in ill-posed regions. Furthermore, we introduce rich detail information from gradient features and construct a Detail-Aware Volume (DAV) by aggregating the group-wise cost volume under the guidance of gradient spatial attention, thus enhancing the correlation modeling in detailed structures. Jointly, MSFV and DAV provide rich correlation priors for disparity iterative optimization. Experimental results show that our method achieves competitive results on the ETH3D and KITTI2015 benchmarks. Compared with the state-of-the-art methods, our method demonstrates stronger performance in zero-shot generalization.

Purpose This review paper aims to provide a comprehensive review of Dubins robot path planning, which has become increasingly important in mobile robotics, autonomous vehicles and industrial applications. The authors identify key developments, analyze existing approaches and highlight the fundamental constraints, algorithms and future opportunities involving curvature-constrained, forward-only path planning. Design/methodology/approach The review consists of three parts: basic Dubins theory, seven decades of development and future opportunities. In the first part, the authors summarize problem formulations and representative computational strategies/algorithms. In the second part, the seventy years of development are divided into four stages, with each stage summarizing developments in important topics such as point-to-point planning, obstacle avoidance and variable speed planning. In addition, the authors analyze current challenges and evaluate recent extensions in cooperative, real-time and learning-based planning frameworks. Findings Dubins path planning has evolved from simple analytical models to complex multirobot and dynamic scenarios. While exact solutions exist for basic tasks, the scalability, obstacle constraints and real-time responsiveness remain active challenges. Promising future directions include integrating machine learning for adaptive planning, and extending to Reeds–Shepp and nonholonomic systems in three-dimensional environments. Originality/value This review offers a structured and in-depth overview of path planning for Dubins robots, connecting core theoretical concepts with the latest developments and real-world implementations. Unlike prior surveys that roughly treat general nonholonomic planning or sampling-based methods, this paper for the first time emphasizes the curvature-constrained planning, especially under the Dubins constraints. By identifying underexplored areas such as dynamic environments, real-time applications, this review offers actionable insights and future research directions valuable to both researchers and practitioners in mobile and industrial robots.

Panoramic 3D reconstruction is essential for immersive scene understanding in robotics, AR, and autonomous driving. However, most existing methods are designed for pinhole images and generalize poorly to 360° inputs due to the scarcity of panoramic training data and the high cost of retraining. We present Pano3R, the first training-free framework for panoramic 3D reconstruction that adapts existing pinhole-based models without any retraining. Pano3R consists of two stages. Specifically, the pre-processing stage applies a position-aware pairing strategy to decompose each panorama into a minimal set of perspective views. These views are selected to ensure sufficient co-visible regions while minimizing the number of projections. The test-time optimization stage incorporates a pose-prior-guided global alignment strategy to improve global consistency and mitigate accumulated errors. Our method enables accurate 360° reconstruction under both single- and multi-view input conditions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Pano3R consistently improves reconstruction accuracy and pose estimation quality, establishing a strong and practical benchmark for training-free panoramic 3D reconstruction.

Variational quantum eigensolvers are touted as a near-term algorithm capable of impacting many applications. However, the potential has not yet been realized, with few claims of quantum advantage and high resource estimates, especially due to the need for optimization in the presence of noise. Finding algorithms and methods to improve convergence is important to accelerate the capabilities of near-term hardware for variational quantum eigensolver or more broad applications of hybrid methods in which optimization is required. To this goal, we look to use modern approaches developed in circuit simulations and stochastic classical optimization, which can be combined to form a surrogate optimization approach to quantum circuits. Using an approximate (classical central processing unit/graphical processing unit) state vector simulator as a surrogate model, we efficiently calculate an approximate Hessian, which is passed as input for a quantum processing unit or exact circuit simulator. This method will lend itself well to parallelization across quantum processing units. We demonstrate the capabilities of such an approach with and without sampling noise and a proof-of-principle demonstration on a quantum processing unit utilizing 40 qubits.

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) has been widely studied with the goal of transferring knowledge from a label-rich source domain to a related but unlabeled target domain. Most UDA techniques achieve this by reducing the feature discrepancies between the two domains to learn domain-invariant feature representations. While domain-invariant feature representations can reduce the differences between the source and target domains, excessively simplifying these differences may cause the model to overlook important domain-specific features, resulting in a decline in transfer learning effectiveness. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel Gaussian Mixture Model for graph domain adaptation (GMM). This model effectively reduces the distributional bias between the source and target domains by modeling the distribution differences on a graph structure. GMM leverages the local structural information of the graph and the clustering capability of the Gaussian mixture model to automatically learn the latent mapping relationships between the source and target domains. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to introduce a Gaussian mixture model into UDA. Extensive experimental results on three standard benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed GMM algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised domain adaptation methods in terms of performance.

The autonomous control of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) presents a challenging problem in the field of control. Conventional autopilot designs utilize single-input, single-output (SISO) controllers, such as PID controllers, which may become unstable under certain conditions. To overcome these limitations, researchers have explored the use of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms in UAV control. This paper reviews related works in the field and proposes a study to evaluate the impact of shaping rewards based on aircraft attitude on the effectiveness of UAV control. We investigated the application of reinforcement learning in UAV control, specifically focusing on the impact of shaping rewards based on aircraft attitude in variable wind speed environments. Two experiments were conducted to investigate the training rate and control effectiveness of agents with shaping rewards and non-shaping rewards. The findings indicate that shaping rewards based on flight attitude effectively reduce turbulence in the aircraft's flight process and outperform non-shaping rewards in altitude and heading control in the Gaussian wind speed model.

What should we look for in a game? How well do existing games embody good instructional and gaming design principles? How do we put those design principles into practice? The following chapters will review several games of different genres and domains. For each game, there are two chapters. The first is an impartial review of the game and the second is a description of the methods and lessons learned from the game developer’s perspective. In this chapter, we introduce each game briefly, discuss the criteria used to review the games, and summarize some of the key points you should look for in these and other games.